Episode Summary
In this Prime Talk Podcast Sponsored by GETIDA – Kyle Walker CAO – Chief Acquisition Officer of Foundry Brands – Foundry Brands are operators that have launched, scaled, and successfully exited brands that generated over $2B in revenue – they are now using their experience, industry expertise and technology platform to acquire, build and grow enduring brands, also more information about Kyle’s life journey. #KyleWalker #FoundryBrands
About Kyle Walker of Foundry Brands – Kyle is an experienced digital brand builder and ex-Amazonian that created and helped launch over 10K digital businesses on Amazon, founded three global multi-billion-dollar Amazon programs, and helped inform many of the Amazon tools and technology brand owners use today. Kyle lives in Sammamish, WA, with his wife and two sports-obsessed boys. He loves golf and played Division 1 baseball.
Find the Full Episode Below
Yoni Mazor 0:06
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of prime talk. Today I’m having a special guest I’m having Kyle Walker. Kyle is the CAO, which is the chief acquisitions officer for foundry brands, which is an E-commerce brand portfolio company. So Kyle, welcome to the show.
Kyle Walker 0:20
Hey, thanks for having me.
Yoni Mazor 0:22
Great to have you on board. Alright, so today’s episode is going to be the story of Kyle Walker gonna share with us a lot, right, you’re gonna share with us, who are you? Where are you from? Where were you born? Where did you grow up, as you begin your professional career step by step to where you are today in the world of E-commerce. So I guess without further ado, let’s jump right into it.
Kyle Walker 0:41
Alright, well, I appreciate being here. You know, let’s try and gloss over the boring parts here. But uh, you know, grew up here in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon,
Kyle Walker 0:53
I played a lot of sports growing up, including baseball, which is what took me to college started at the University of Portland play in Division One baseball, ended up transferring back to the University of Oklahoma. Baseball is something that’s, you know, still a part of my life now that I have a NINE and a six-year-old son.
Yoni Mazor 1:14
So hold on, hold on, and let me understand this. So your baseball game? It will get you a full scholarship they pay for the entire university and college for you.
Kyle Walker 1:24
All of it. Baseball is an interesting sport because unlike a lot of other sports, like proportions for it, so you have what is it 1111 and three-quarters scholarships to fill out a baseball team. Whereas like on basketball, you get 11 full rights. So it’s a little bit different, but I did get some money. Certainly was a big consideration in where I went to school. You know,
Yoni Mazor 1:48
When went to Oklahoma, that’s was the first time you were out of state outside of Portland, Portland.
Kyle Walker 1:53
No, baseball is a crazy sport. It takes you around all summer to a bunch of different places. So I’ve moved around quite a bit, but it was the furthest I’ve been a way to go to school and University of Portland, I think has about 3000 students and university Oklahoma had, you know, at the time 34 to 35,000 students, so definitely an eye-opening experience.
Yoni Mazor 2:18
Very cool. Okay. So what did you learn in school, I guess.
Kyle Walker 2:22
So I was a marketing undergraduate. You know, I had red-shirted a year in baseball. So I went straight through to grad school. And probably one of the best pieces of advice I got, as I was talking to some of my professors and my dean when I was doing that, they said,
Kyle Walker 2:39
You know, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to continue and get your MBA right after finishing your undergrad. However, you should try and get out there and get as much experience as you can, because it’ll make your MBA kind of you know, sing, and right. So you don’t learn in most MBA programs, you’re not going to learn anything that you probably didn’t learn in undergrad, you’re going to apply it and you’re going to apply a lot of those learning to kind of analyzing and, and strategy questions with business. So having a little bit of background. So I had interned with the Portland Trailblazers in their sponsorship group.
Kyle Walker 3:20
I didn’t turn with the local speaking services company like an agency that managed a lot of high profile speakers
Kyle Walker 3:28
Tried to get as much experience as I could. And
Yoni Mazor 3:31
So let me understand this when you entered by in the trailblazer, you know, for marketing, you’re you need to help market the NBA basketball team.
Kyle Walker 3:39
Yeah, so what’s interesting is that there’s a lot of larger corporations take like a Toyota, and, you know, Toyota will sponsor, you know, part of either the arena signage within the arena, they’ll sponsor events. And Portland was a unique market in that. You know, there were a lot of demographic profiles of Portland at the time that made it a really valuable market. So I believe the Portland Trailblazers at the time were
Kyle Walker 4:09
First or second in terms of total sponsorship revenue. Just because you had
Yoni Mazor 4:14
In the NBA?
Kyle Walker 4:15
Yeah.
Yoni Mazor 4:16
Wow. I didn’t realize that.
Kyle Walker 4:17
Yeah. Because you had you know, you had a fairly, this would have been, what, the late 90s, early 2000s you had a really ecommerce forward. You know, consumer base,
Yoni Mazor 4:29
There is a time of Clyde Drexler if I’m not mistaken, Or Not
Kyle Walker 4:33
A little bit post-Clyde Drexler more than Scottie Pippen Steve Smith, when they brought in went to the Western Conference Finals and lost to the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq, but you know, it was a fun team. It was a fun time and it was great to learn the experience of really what those larger brains were hoping to accomplish with sponsorship through the team and help them execute on that.
Kyle Walker 5:01
You know, after that finished up baseball, my former Dean, who was in class one day, and he goes, I need help. I’ll team of mice, you got to come to help me.
Kyle Walker 5:14
And, you know, we ended up becoming good friends both through, you know, coaching the team last summer, and he ended up taking a job at the University of South Florida. So my very first job out of college was teaching management negotiations to, you know, junior and senior level students at the University of South Florida, which was a blast.
Kyle Walker 5:37
And I think he had dreams that I was going to go on and get a PhD. and stay in the academic world, and, you know, nothing against it. It was an amazing, you know, four or five years of experience, and something that I’m super grateful for, but at the end of the day, I just enjoy kind of the action and moving a little bit quicker than maybe academics does.
Yoni Mazor 5:58
Right, the craziness and agility of the private market or the business market, but Okay, so your first job after college was in South Florida, I said,
Kyle Walker 6:07
Yeah, yeah.
Yoni Mazor 6:08
And why was that? Let’s start stamping this with your so we get some chronology here.
Kyle Walker 6:13
So we’re looking at about 2003, I started and that’ll take you to about 2007 2000.
Yoni Mazor 6:22
So about four years, that’s pretty serious. But this is after you got your undergrad. I mean, your masters, right. Correct?
Kyle Walker 6:29
Correct.
Yoni Mazor 6:29
Are you gonna hit Florida for years? 203 to 207? Yeah, we’re saying,
Kyle Walker 6:34
Yeah, I finished at the University of Portland, moved back home, but took a lot of my initial classes at Oklahoma,
Kyle Walker 6:42
And then moved to the Tampa St. Pete area, it was a blast. That’s where my wife and I got married.
Yoni Mazor 6:51
Set up just for the people here not from Florida, St. Petersburg, I would assume.
Yoni Mazor 6:55
Yeah. So I moved to Tampa in February, I believe it’s somewhere on the West Coast. West Coast, right in Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico area.
Kyle Walker 7:04
Yep. Called the Gulf side for sure. Of offset
Yoni Mazor 7:07
And you met your wife were in the school work community.
Kyle Walker 7:11
We met in college, and we dated for several years. But we ended up finally getting married when we lived in Florida and ended up you know, it’s not very often that I’m gonna get 10 guys together to go play baseball after college and ended up getting passionate about playing golf. This led to my next career move, which was, have a friend that worked at Nike and started working in Nike golf for a little bit. And that’s actually what took us up to Pittsburgh. You know, post my,
Yoni Mazor 7:45
Let me get this straight. Let me get this straight, you relocated to Florida. Fashion and golf started to do some work with Nike, which is based out of Beaverton, back in your hometown of Portland area. But that pushed into Pennsylvania at of all places.
Kyle Walker 8:01
Yeah, there was a territory that opened up. So I would, I would spend a lot of time in the car between kind of Western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Ohio. And, you know, it’s around when Nike Golf was kind of taking off.
Yoni Mazor 8:17
This is 2007 2000 it already?
Kyle Walker 8:20
Yeah, we would have officially moved I guess in January of 2009.
Yoni Mazor 8:25
Hmm, so what are you doing between 2007 2009? Because I know you you’re working with, you know, the University of South Florida up to 2007. So these two is already doing like, yeah,
Kyle Walker 8:36
I was still working for Nike during those two years, just in a more limited role right there in Tampa St. Pete. And then had the opportunity to kind of grow within Nike was super passionate about golf. And, and, Nike coming from my home state was, was a cool, cool company to learn from and then, you know, been Pittsburgh for about six, seven months. And, you know, the territory, they kind of reorganized territory, so we had the opportunity to move or, you know, I needed to find another job. And so, you know, we had just moved to Pittsburgh. And one of the accounts that I managed was Dick’s Sporting Goods and golf galaxy, which Dick’s Sporting Goods had just recently bought. And so I moved inside Dick’s Sporting Goods and golf galaxy to be a buyer over there. So I bought originally a lot of clubs.
Yoni Mazor 9:36
And that was your work for Dick’s Sporting Goods. So you shifted away from Nike and to the retailing side of things?
Kyle Walker 9:41
I did. I did.
Yoni Mazor 9:42
Okay, but I want to step back a little bit. Just understand the world of golf. As far as I know, today. Nikes out of golf are still there.
Kyle Walker 9:47
They’re still in golf in terms of apparel and accessories. They’re out of golf in terms of equipment.
Yoni Mazor 9:55
Yeah, like clubs and balls and stuff there. Yeah. Okay. And they give us a little bit you know In touchpoint about the world of golf, you know, from your neck experience, what’s going on with that, especially those times 2009 is a little bit of a recessionary. That’s my way they say golf is more of a rich or wealthier sportsman was that did affect the industry was growing was shrinking. What were the dynamics back then?
Kyle Walker 10:15
Yeah, it’s a fairly interesting story. So it’s like Tiger Woods kind of comes on the scene, there’s a bunch of net new golfers that take up the sport. And so for a period leading up to that recession, you know, more golfers are being added to the sport than at any other time in history. And so you almost can’t be successful in golf for some time. And you see a bunch of golf courses being built, you see a lot of kind of corporate entities buying big chunks of real estate in the golf world.
Kyle Walker 10:49
And so there was a lot of transition, but there was still a lot of growth. And, you know, my job was, in kind of, if you take a step back 1015 years, most golf courses, the local pro owns the pro shop. And so you were, you would travel around, and obviously, you were trying to get Nike and presence in those pro shops. But you were also, you know, in a lot of ways acting as their merchant, right, like letting them know, when there were deals, letting them you know, kind of fixing how they merchandise product and on their shelves, you know, fighting for shelf space, all of those things.
Yoni Mazor 11:27
Sure. So let me get this straight. So the actual like venues, the golf courses, they were, you know, actively retailing, and that was the hot spots for retailing, golf equipment, and called golf gear.
Kyle Walker 11:37
Yeah, it was the best way to get your product in front of customers was just to make sure that you had a presence in those golf shots. And so we would always have goals around the kind of what we call door account and penetration within those doors. And so you wanted to have some product in the door, and then you tried to grow that presence of a product that you had within the store.
Kyle Walker 11:59
In around 2000, maybe 567 It starts to shift to there’s so much golf construction going on, you end up having more of a corporate presence. And so the local pro didn’t necessarily own the store anymore, the corporation did. And so
Kyle Walker 12:17
You would have a lot of larger strategic relationships. And then, you know, I managed the Dick’s Sporting Goods and Golf Galaxy account, along with some colleagues,
Yoni Mazor 12:27
But disappointing us for example, did they ever have locations in the golf facility courses or the add their brick or you know, brick and mortar stores? They do a lot of sports and gear, but they also have I guess the golf section within the store? What was their footprint?
Kyle Walker 12:40
Yeah, so because it’s kind of famous for having what they call their store within a store concept. And so if you walk into a Dick’s Sporting Goods in their retail environment, you typically have very clear lines between sections in the store. Like it’s not just a one big free for all it’s like you have your golf section, in some cases, it’s even a little bit closed off. And you know, it has a different set of kind of in-store signage, it has its unique kind of set up.
Yoni Mazor 13:12
Probably ambiance also, right?
Kyle Walker 13:14
Yeah, the ambiance you’ll usually have things like you know, a little putting green to trial putters, and, you know, then you’ll walk over to the running section. And you may have, you know, a completely different look and feel because you’re talking about merchandising apparel at that point or shoes. So, you know, it’s an interesting experience to learn how, you know, a brand like Nike builds their presence through, you know, the way that they’re kind of participating in that store environment, right, who you’re next to, what shelf space is the most valuable, you know, all of those things.
Kyle Walker 13:49
And so, you know, really,
Kyle Walker 13:53
You know, moving inside to Dick’s Sporting Goods it was a lot of the same thing. It’s just on a much bigger scale instead of having this little pro shop that sits on it on a golf course and you’re worried about merchandising it you’re now worried about merchandising your presence within a whole store
Yoni Mazor 14:10
Right, so this all you move into the sporting goods with 2009?
Kyle Walker 14:15
Yeah, 2010 2011 I forget
Yoni Mazor 14:18
2010 2011 and you’re in charge of golfing or everything was there,
Kyle Walker 14:23
Usually, small categories within so I started in equipment and then move to like balls, bags, travel stuff.
Kyle Walker 14:32
And so did that for a while ended up leaving to move over to GNC.com, really got passionate about the E-commerce space. So as part of my role at Dick’s.
Kyle Walker 14:45
You know, I’d be in charge of kind of our E-commerce presence for our category and got to work with the column team quite a bit and just kind of realize that’s where I wanted to spend my time ended up finding a role at GNC.com.
Yoni Mazor 14:57
And what was that
Kyle Walker 15:00
That would have been Gosh 2020 1120 12.
Yoni Mazor 15:05
So you’ve been with the exporting for a year or two right? And then you shifted to GNC also on Pennsylvania or
Kyle Walker 15:13
Correct. Everything’s
Yoni Mazor 15:14
Where they base that just for this for different physical, Okay, so within the zone, got it so are you passionate also nutrition stuff like that or this is more like a professional thing for you, you know, focusing on other category but was still within retail.
Kyle Walker 15:32
Yeah, I think it was more a passion play just to be in an ecommerce space, but it certainly interested me enough in nutrition. Being an athlete, I was fairly close to, you know, some of those products and, you know, had been into a GNC store. So it wasn’t like I was completely unfamiliar, but it was more of a career move.
Yoni Mazor 15:52
Yeah, I remember I used to be sorry to cut you on this. But I used to have a wealth facility back in the retail days in Secaucus, New Jersey. And guess who’s based in Secaucus, New Jersey. Your nemesis, vitamin shop?
Kyle Walker 16:04
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, they were always top of mind.
Yoni Mazor 16:08
Yeah. Okay, so sorry about that. Oh, good.
Kyle Walker 16:13
No, it was a growing industry and, and GNC had done, you know, some really good things at the time developing their private label products. And so they were able to kind of continue to take market share and take it at a higher margin. And so, it was fun to watch the growth, but again, GNC was kind of late to the ecommerce game. And so a lot of the things that we were doing, you know, seemed at the time even to be a little bit slower, slower pace to get done, but I was in charge of E-commerce operations. So I was kind of the connective tissue between our marketing and merchandising team, our in-store team, you know, our visual merchandising team on the website.
Kyle Walker 16:58
And then all the operation or customer experience, things that we were doing, whether it was customer service, or whether it was upgraded to the website. And just really enjoyed that work. Enjoyed this.
Yoni Mazor 17:13
I want to touch another, I realized that you did so much detail, I didn’t realize all that I want to touch a few points of the scale. So with Dick’s Sporting Goods, how many stores were you’re in charge of, or what was there a footprint in terms of actual locations? As you remember back in the day?
Kyle Walker 17:28
Oh, gosh,
Yoni Mazor 17:29
Doesn’t a few 100,000 you can approximate.
Kyle Walker 17:33
I want to say we had about 800 900 Dick’s Sporting Goods stores.
Yoni Mazor 17:38
Wow, that many I didn’t realize that so much. Wow. Okay, and Jesus is probably even more realistic. What about GNC is Friday, remember?
Kyle Walker 17:45
Well, and what was important was Dick’s Sporting Goods also bought golf, Galaxy golf. Galaxy had around 100 stores at the time as well. So you had about 1000 stores that had some kind of golf presence
Yoni Mazor 17:56
And you touch all of all the stores correctly when you were working for corporate your footprint. So the entire footprint, okay, and the same thing goes for GNC, how many you how many locations there as far as you remember. I know that every single mall that America has one as far as I can remember. But yeah,
Yoni Mazor 18:10
Yeah, it was a pretty massive number, but GNC was unique in the sense that they also had a franchise model. And so they realized
Yoni Mazor 18:20
Got so all in with corporate and franchise as far as remember, what was it? 2010 10s of 1000s I think maybe even global right? Yeah, some overseas?
Kyle Walker 18:28
Yeah, it was global. I honestly don’t recall the number. But if I had to guess, you know, several 1000 At least four or 5000 probably got it.
Yoni Mazor 18:39
Okay. And, uh, alright, so GNC that was, you know, further growth experience for the for you, I guess. And then was your next station then?
Kyle Walker 18:47
Yeah. And then, you know, had the opportunity had we had our oldest son, he was about a year at the time, and we came home for that first Christmas. And my wife and I talked about getting back to the northwest at some point and, you know, he was a year old and start to walk in and talking and being around grandparents was like, maybe our five-year plan should be a, you know, two years plan to get back sooner. And, you know, just happened. One of my good, good friends. His wife worked at Amazon at the time and,
Kyle Walker 19:18
You know, just reached out to him to check in and he was like, hey, you should send me your resume. My wife works at Amazon. And I think from the moment that that happened, and so we moved here. Back to the northwest was about three and a half weeks. It happened fast.
Yoni Mazor 19:34
And why was that when you made the transition? So you were moving from Pennsylvania to the Northwest. We moved to Oregon or Washington, Washington, Washington.
Kyle Walker 19:43
Yeah. Just outside of Seattle would have been 2013. Gosh,
Yoni Mazor 19:48
He said about a year with GNC a year or two ago.
Kyle Walker 19:51
Yeah. Yeah.
Yoni Mazor 19:52
Okay, so I was enrolled in like a storm and two and three weeks and this was a 213 I think there was an explosive year Amazon as far as I can see from all the guests come to the show on the selling side. And also on the working on Amazon side, it was just, you know, the master has awakened and okay, what was your responsibility? What was your trajectory there?
Kyle Walker 20:10
So I was on the marketplace side, and we just launched what we call the US business, which was, you know if you think about what eBay, you know, they would sell a lot of refurbished and high quality refurbished products and, and some useful products. And you could always do that on Amazon, you know if you happen to get two iPads for a Christmas gift you can go on as an individual kind of sell them. But what we saw was that there was an opportunity to professionalize that selling space, right alongside all the rest of the marketplace. And so, I was brought in as an account manager,
Kyle Walker 20:45
You know, really, as opposed to other places where, you know, maybe at GNC, we had an account manager for our payment processing, or the back end of our website, you know, they typically would kind of occasionally participate in some kind of marketing and promotion. But for the most part, you know, like triage, it was like, Hey, we’re having an issue with this, or hey, can we get a report on this and things like that, at Amazon, it was made very clear that my job as an account manager was really to learn from our businesses that we were that were using our marketplace, and try and find ways to bring that voice back to our tech team so that we could continue to scale. So it was like, you know, I, I get to know these be specific accounts. Sometimes I go visit them in person, you know, I get to know their operations. And I find out what their pain points were like, what would what could we possibly unlock that would add value to what they were doing and let them go faster. And then it was my job to kind of take that, translate it and bring it back to our tech team.
Yoni Mazor 21:53
I love that. I love this. Because as a former Amazon seller, I love that I didn’t realize that that’s so much depth into this. So I take us a few, I guess examples of, you know, some of this experience, you know, you connect with Amazon sellers, third-party sellers on the platform, getting some insights of things that were valuable, taken back to Amazon, and hopefully Amazon took some action on it to make the marketplace even more robust. So if anything comes to mind, though, we’re happy to, you know, kind of pick your brain on this. And
Kyle Walker 22:21
Yeah, have a great story. So I started, I started in around July, around November, December, you know, one of my colleagues and I talked about going to see us for the first time. And so I reached out to the source
Yoni Mazor 22:38
Electronics show in Vegas, usually in January, February beginning.
Kyle Walker 22:43
So we talked about, you know, reaching out to some of our partners that I’d gotten to know over the prior six months and meeting with them. And I remember having lunch with two guys that had, you know, a fairly big used operation at the time, probably doing seven $8 billion a year of use product. And, you know, we had lunch that day, and I was asking them, you know, what we can do to make things better. And, you know, their feeling was like, they took a lot of pride in the kind of there, their use products that refurbished products, they had, you know, really tight warehouse process where, you know, they were, they were just as good at kind of certifying that something was refurbished is as anybody else in the world. And I’ve been out to visit them. And so I knew it was true.
Yoni Mazor 23:34
Oh, well, they missed out. I was sorry. Sorry. Remember,
Kyle Walker 23:36
I’m actually in New Jersey somewhere far from north or south? Or that? Okay.
Yoni Mazor 23:44
So you want to try a jersey? Nice.
Kyle Walker 23:46
Yeah, I did a lot of traveling up and down New Jersey for a while they’re nice.
Kyle Walker 23:51
And so, you know, they’re their basic feeling was, look, these products should be marketed in a way that, you know, appeals to consumers, like there’s no, there’s nothing wrong with something that’s certified refurbished. And, a lot of times, it’s brand new, it’s just a closeout from a big brand that, you know, doesn’t want to compete with kind of their new line of product. And so we knew that it was a high-quality product that customers could benefit from seeing. And so we thought about it, I took that back home and thought about the merchandising program. And one of the challenges that we had is obviously on Amazon is you know, you share a detail page. And so, you know, those use products tended to get pushed down to
Kyle Walker 24:36
Well, you know, a different kind of experience on a different page away from kind of the main core Buy Box. And so, during that time, probably from that conversation, several things emerged one was we had to use Buy Box for some time so you could, you could choose to buy something new you can choose to buy it, use it
Kyle Walker 25:00
And then probably the biggest thing that came from that conversation was just thinking, hey, you know what, what this need is its separate kind of experience like a certified refurbished, say iPad is different than a brand new iPad, and they both might be valuable to a customer. So how do we show them that experience without disrupting the normal, you know, shopping experience? So we ended up piloting a program several months later that we at the time called the certified refurbished program, which has now become the Amazon renewed program and is a big global program. And it was born out of that conversation in Las Vegas because we partnered up with several really good kinds of refurbishes we tried to stock you know, the selection that we knew was going to be the most valuable to customers to save, save money and the highest quality. And so we partnered with a handful of really high-quality vendors made it a high bar to participate in the program because we, we knew that you know, this program only works if the customer experience is great. And you know, several weeks into it, I remember looking at the data and we were like, Oh my gosh, like this is becoming a huge program and we’ve only got about 100 products right now imagine the size if we open this up to everything that everybody wants to buy from a refurbished standpoint and so to scale it you had a different set of problems like you couldn’t just go visit every single person you were going to let into the program you had to have kind of standards and you had to figure out how you’re going to monitor that
Kyle Walker 26:42
You also had to figure out a way because so much selection moves through these warehouses you had to figure out how to tell them what to prioritize and so we essentially built systems to do both of those things and Amazon renewed has continued to be you know a huge program
Yoni Mazor 26:59
Wanted to transition from I guess CR or certified refurbished to renewed which is more of I guess elegant branding element but as far as you remember
Kyle Walker 27:09
Want to say maybe 2015 2016 somewhere in there I was no longer involved so
Yoni Mazor 27:15
Guys so within a year or two to you know the inception already put this up for the success they want to you know, be more bullish about it they redouble re-branded and put out there and I guess expanded in its category capacity or they mostly stay in the electronics domain.
Kyle Walker 27:31
Electronics is what drove the business but there were plenty enough opportunities when you thought about other categories that had similar profiles as you know, athletic equipment, right, like we don’t have a peloton bike, but I still get emails all the time about, you know, peloton refurbishing bikes. And you know, it’s a great way for customers, in a lot of cases to save a few bucks,
Yoni Mazor 27:56
What about the watches as far as your member watches?
Kyle Walker 27:59
We didn’t participate as much in jewelry. You know, jewelry was kind of its little interesting category at the time.
Kyle Walker 28:08
But, you know, certainly tried to Expand Selection across, you know, every category that made sense, right.
Yoni Mazor 28:16
Very cool. So that’s very interesting to hear from the feedback of the third party seller, you bring it back in, you created a whole new brand new opportunity for the sellers, and it’s probably in the billions right now. So, you know, one good idea can bring up to the billions of dollars worth of revenue for third-party sellers. And of course, also to Amazon to the marketplace. And on the other hand, the consumers, have more options and more selection, more variety, and hopefully, seven, seven, on no save costs when shopping. Okay, so what is the next station within Amazon? Being you know, first of all with, I guess, with certified re-purpose, Tim,
Kyle Walker 28:50
Well, just to tie that up, you know, one of the coolest things about that program was, you know, a year or so into doing it, you know, a lot of the early participants were growing like crazy, because they, you know, they had seen this idea come to life that was probably overdue, they had a lot of ownership because we had done it with them. And I remember, one group, in particular, sent me a thank you video at the end of the year. And, you know, this video came from all of their employees saying, you know, how much of a difference that made and, you know, both the stability of their job, you know, th
